Find your purpose. Find your why. Find your passion. Find your opportunity. Find the ‘place where it all comes from’. If it isn’t these kinds of conversations, its, 7-steps to wealth, 30 days to fitness, 4 hot tips to wellness, 9 incredible steps to lead a life you love, fake it til you make it.

These are all goals and paths that I see being spruiked and talked about every day.
In the same days, I see people chasing empty dreams, people feeling unhappy with what they are doing, transient jobs, transient goals, and ever changing focus. Chasing the faster way to achieve some kind of goal external to oneself, money, body fat percentage etc.

To anyone looking for what to do next, I say, Start with WHO.

Start with who you want to be. Don’t worry about your why, don’t worry about your purpose until you know the kind of person that you want to be. How can you control an outcome external to you, without being the master of your own perception of self. How can you advance yourself and your happiness in any meaningful way without knowing the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want to be?

Who you are is with you in every moment, of everyday. It informs every decision, it is with you in the darkest hours and the brightest moments…. Do you know who that person is?

Your who will affect your why, it will affect your purpose, it will affect how you approach each day, each problem and each success. ‘Who’ you are is something that you are always in control of, so you have it with you in the good times, in the public eye and when you are on your own.

I believe that the reason that so many people are unhappy in a time of unparalleled opportunity and luxury for so many, is that many people have lost connection to who they are. If you don’t know who you are, you rely on external factors to fulfil you. If you don’t know who you are, and have standards to which you hold yourself accountable, then you can find yourself deep into a life that makes you miserable.

I am all about practical, so let’s have a look at how you can get to your who.

First, cut out the bullshit. Stop bullshitting yourself, stop bullshitting others. Don’t try and force your ‘Who’ to come from any particular place, or fit some kind of external circumstance, or look like something that presents well when you talk about it to others. If you bullshit yourself in early days, you will never find your actual ‘who’ and will never find the consonance you need between your mind and your actions to be truly happy.

Before you jump to it, ‘Being happy’ is not a Who, it is a result of being your who, and working towards being the best version of yourself.

Second, every ‘who’ has pro’s and cons. So embrace your real ‘who’ and then assess the pros and cons of what that means. Your ‘who’ might include that you have very high standards, that you demand the best out of yourself at all times. A pro of this kind of ‘who’ can be that you might do some really great work, a ‘con’ of the same trait might be that you might never be truly satisfied with your outcomes, believing you can always do better, or that you might be isolated because your high standards make it hard for you to accept less.

It doesn’t matter what your who is, it only matters that you recognise it and own it. Sometimes the hardest part of finding your who is admitting that some of the things aren’t what we’d like them to be. You might be trying to find happiness, but you are naturally cynical, by denying your natural cynicism you might be actually making it harder to be happy. Instead, once you have found your who, you can work on using who you are to find real happiness. Sometimes the path is not easy, but I will discuss that at a later date.

Thirdly, you ‘Who’ shouldn’t be made up of a bunch of words.

Values as words are dangerous. Words can have different meanings, words can be interpreted differently. Your who should be made up of a couple of questions, or filters. Questions you can ask yourself in every situation. Filters you can use on all of your actions, goals and why’s.

Perhaps part of your who is ‘to look after your family’. A pro of this ‘who’ can be that you are an attentive and loving family member. A con could be that you act in a manner that is to the detriment of others in order to look after your family. Plenty of organised crime is committed under the guise of looking after ‘the family’. The ‘Who question’ in this instance might be “Am I doing the best thing for my family?”

If your who is a question then before you do anything at all, you can ask yourself, Am I doing this in line with x? Am I following my who? Am I improving on the person that I want to be? When the answer is yes more often than no, then you will find yourself being happier. Regardless of your external circumstances.

Your who is not all you are. It is a goal, an outcome and a prescription for yourself about how to conduct your life. You will have times where you drift from it, but when you have a who, you can work back towards being the person that you want to be. BEING the PERSON you want to BE. Not having the things you want to have, looking the way you want to look, saying the things you want to say…. It’s about being the person you want to be. It provides a centre for you to return to, a path to look towards and a measuring stick by which to gauge your progress as a person.

I don’t believe that in life you regret missed chances for external gain. I believe that you regret opportunities to act as the person you believe you should be. In the end we regret the times that we acted contrary to our nature, contrary to the kind of person we want to be.

So, in action. How does this work?

Well personally, my ‘Who’, the who that I aspire to be and maintain. The questions I ask myself every day to remain close to my ‘who’ are as follows.

“Am I working as hard as I can possibly work?”

“Am I being nice and helping others?”

“Am I doing more than I am talking about?”

“Am I doing this the right way, not necessarily the easy way?”

“Am I practicing what I preach?”

“Am I being empirically good at what I am doing?”

These are my main who questions. They help keep me focused.

Who am I? I hope to be a hard worker. I take the question “Am I working as hard as I can possibly work?” and I refuse to fail as a result of my work ethic. I might fail at something due to lack of talent, but to maintain my who it will never be for lack of trying. When I don’t work that hard for some reason…. I feel shitty, and I know the only way to properly fix it is to get back on the grind. On the downside, I have trouble sometimes deciding when some time away from work would actually be beneficial to how much work I can do. Every who has pros and cons. I have many questions, and twice as many pros and cons, more than I can write here. They are for me, and they are mine. But across all my questions, and all my pros and cons I try to keep a standard to which I can hold myself.

I stray, certainly. Some days I come home from work, and I haven’t worked as hard as I can possibly work. Some days I don’t train as hard as I can possibly train. Some days I tell people to do things (i.e. eat clean) that I haven’t been doing.
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It is those moments, that I feel my worst, when there is dissonance between the person WHO I want to be and the person that I am being. I have carried these WHO questions through the many different things I have done in my life so far. I encourage you to cut the bullshit and find yours, and find it for no one else but you.

I'd love to hear how you go. Thanks for taking the time to read and share the beginning of working on your Who. Be real, be you, and as always Just Be Nice.

Well today I didn’t see that coming. Honestly I thought it was terrifying enough that Trump had become 50% of the presidential candidates with a shot at the United States Presidency. It’s not even because he had been sexist, racist and xenophobic. In Australia we have had heads of state that share similar sentiments, we regularly hear about people wanting to ‘Stop the Boats’ here, which is our equivalent of wanting to build a wall I suppose.

The problem for me was that he just wasn’t good enough. Hardly presidential, completely uninformed, unprepared, easily upset. A name calling, impatient and at time childish fully grown man, with a very wonky grasp on facts ranging from mistruths to outright lies on a scale that boggled my mind coming from a man that is making speeches in public and running for the office termed ‘leader of the free world’.

Then, today, Donald Trump won.

Upon reflection, I can see how this has come to pass. Taking a look around at the kinds of things I see every day it’s not hard to see how often we laud and support and let Trump-like things in our own society.

We have become a society that applauds average. We applaud fraud. We applaud small doses of even criminal activity, depending on who does it. No longer is it important to BE an expert, you simply have to SAY you are an expert. People attend university less to acquire knowledge, and more to acquire ‘a piece of paper’. You can be paid simply for what your Instagram looks like, rather than the things you are doing. We have business coaches that don’t know how to run businesses promising 7-figure profits, fitness experts promising expedited results to get a certain body type, everything quicker, easier, simpler. People often want to hear your ‘pitch’ they don’t want to know what you are up to.

We are forgetting the art of mastery. We are spending so much time and energy looking like something, that we are forgetting to actually BE that something.

We now have the biggest scale outcome possible from this environment where substance no longer matters. Truth no longer matters. Hype matters. Saying things matters, even if they aren’t true. Pitch matters. We are electing slogans and not actions. The time you have put into actually developing yourself doesn’t matter.

It is the same environment that allows equal amounts of media coverage to climate change denial as it does for the actual facts that human-induced climate change is really happening, right now. Expertise counts less now than it ever did. with volume counting for more than truth. The loudest voice in the room wins, not the person who is actually speaking truth.

Trump has pitched the world’s biggest and best, ‘Get Rich Quick’ scheme to millions of disaffected Americans, and they have responded according to the environment they are accustomed to. Like all good ‘Quick’ schemes, it is low on the details, and high on emotion and ‘Huge, Tremendous’ claims… believe me.
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We are chasing celebrity, appearances and a façade of success and happiness over intelligence and integrity in every other aspect of our lives, so now I can see how we have ended up with a President of the USA that ticks those boxes. Who can offer us a body in a two week challenge, six figure incomes within a month and who can fix our country in ten simple steps that will be enacted within a week of taking office?

Forget the fact that science, evidence and truth will all indicate that these things are impossible, the fact is we buy these pitches every, single, day. It was only a matter of time before the will and actions of the people filtered up to their representatives.

As long as we make celebrities out of actors and athletes who’s behaviour would make us cringe, as long as the only barrier to entry into claiming to be an expert in a certain field is the number of characters you are allowed to use in an Instagram bio, and as long as we keep failing to demand the best out of ourselves and others, the leadership of countries that stand for nothing, will continue to represent the people.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, be better, demand better and as always, Just Be Nice.